The present research project aims to understand how people respond aesthetically to the spatial composition and color composition of simple, visually displayed images. Despite the importance of aesthetic evaluations in our everyday lives -- not only when we visit museums, but also when we buy clothes, choose movies, take vacations, decorate our homes, and landscape our yards -- surprisingly little is known scientifically about what color combinations and spatial arrangements people prefer. Most previous treatments have come from philosophers, artists, and art theorists, who take a prescriptive approach by stating what one should prefer aesthetically. In this project the principal investigator takes a scientific, descriptive approach by analyzing what people actually do prefer aesthetically and the variables that determine these aesthetic preferences. Early findings on spatial composition show, for example, that people prefer symmetrical views of an object (such as a front-view of a face) to be positioned at or near the center of the image, but asymmetrical views (such as a side-view of a face) to be positioned laterally off center so that it faces into the frame. Early findings on color composition show, for instance, that people generally prefer pairs of colors that contain similar (rather than contrasting) colors, but that a given color looks more aesthetically pleasing against a highly contrasting (rather than a similar) color.
The proposed research project provides a promising new bridge between art and science. It defines an interdisciplinary research endeavor -- called aesthetic science -- that uses well-defined behavioral methods to understand an aesthetic dimension of human experience that is distinct from the well-studied cognitive (knowledge-based) aspects and emotional (feeling-based) aspects of experience. It also defines new research methods aimed at understanding different patterns of aesthetic preference between individuals across different aesthetic domains. Do people who prefer unusual, highly contrasting color combinations, for example, also prefer unexpected spatial compositions? Given the pioneering nature of the proposed research on an under-studied topic, all manner of new discoveries are possible, both within the field of aesthetic science and linking it with knowledge in the existing fields of emotion and cognitive science.
During the past 3 years of NSF support we have studied people’s aesthetic preferences for visual input from a scientific perspective: what colors, color combinations, and spatial compositions do people like, and why do they like them? Our work has thus far resulted in 16 publications (1 book, 9 journal articles, 3 book chapters, and 3 conference papers) and 60 presentations at universities, conferences, workshops, and public forums by my students and myself. Color Preferences. We formulated and tested a new theory of human color preference, which proposes that people like colors to the degree that they like the things that are characteristically that color (Palmer & Schloss, 2010). For example, people in general like vivid blues because they tend to like clear sky and clean water, whereas they dislike greenish browns because they tend to dislike biological waste products and rotten food (see Figure). Experimental results strongly support this conclusion, in that our theory accounts for 80% of the pattern of color preferences, much more than theories based on neurophysiology, emotion, or color appearance. Further experiments show that color associations with liked versus disliked social institutions also influence color preferences (Schloss, Pogessi & Palmer, in press). Not only do students at U.C. Berkeley like Berkeley-blue and Berkeley-gold better than Stanford students do, and Stanford students like Stanford-red and white better than Berkeley students do, but the degree to which this is true is strongly correlated with their self-reported degree of school spirit. Color Combinations. We also studied people’s preferences for pairs of colors in combination (Schloss & Palmer, 2011). We found that only about 20% of the pattern of average pair preferences was explained by preferences for the component colors. An additional 60% was explained by their ratings of color harmony: how well people think that colors "go together," independent of whether they like them. Most people tend to prefer combinations of different shades of the same basic color (for example, vivid blue on light blue) rather than different colors of similar shades (for example, vivid blue on vivid red). Further experiments show that preferences for color pairs are sensitive to figure-ground reversals (Schloss & Palmer, in press). We find that people reliably prefer yellower figures on bluer backgrounds to bluer figures on yellower backgrounds, and lighter figures on darker backgrounds to darker figures on lighter backgrounds. We are currently testing several theories about why this might be true. Spatial Compositions. Further research was aimed at understanding what kinds of spatial compositions people like for pictures of meaningful objects, such as a person, dog, chair, or car. In the horizontal dimension, we found systematic tendencies for people to like the focal object to be placed in the center (a "center bias"), if it was a symmetrical object viewed from the front, but to be placed off-center, facing into the frame if it was a leftward or rightward facing view of the same object (an "inward bias"). Vertically, we found a similar inward bias for objects that face upward (e.g., a bowl) or downward (a light fixture). We also found evidence for several "ecological biases" for objects to be positioned in the frame analogously to their characteristic positions relative to a real-world observer (e.g., people like a picture of a flying eagle to be high in the frame and one of a swimming sting-ray to be low in the frame) and for their sizes within the frame to be analogous to their real-world sizes (e.g., people like the image of a mouse to be small within the frame and an image of an elephant to be large within the frame). We have also conducted related research testing Arnheim’s compositional theory of the structural skeleton of a rectangular frame (Palmer & Guidi, in revision). We asked people to judge how well a small probe circle "fits" at various positions within a rectangular frame and found strong support for the structure Arnheim proposed, with elevated "fit" ratings along the rectangle’s global and local axes of symmetry. Individual Differences. Finally, we have studied differences among individuals in various aesthetic domains: preferences for color pairs, dots within frames, shapes of spatial configurations, and musical compositions (Palmer & Griscom, in preparation). We find systematic and stable differences among people in the extent to which they "prefer harmony" – i.e., the extent to which they like things they find to be simpler, more regular, or to fit better together, akin to the notion of "good Gestalt". We also find training effects on preference for harmony, such that art students have lower preference for harmony in visual domains (color, shape, and compositional dimensions) and music students have lower preference for harmony in music than psychology students, who have little training in either art or music.
